Since its beginning, PM&AM Research has been pioneering a broad range of energy deposition applications to revolutionize how the world flies and controls high speed flow in particular, how we execute high-speed flight and flow-control, ranging from high subsonic to hypersonic regimes. There are a number of applications to provide an intuitive feel of the many possibilities opened up by this novel approach. The basic effect stems from our approach to rapidly expand gas out of regions, through which we want high-speed/high-pressure gas to flow. As a simple analogy (requiring some imagination and license), consider the difference in effectiveness of trying to make a projectile cross through the Red Sea at high speed, either firing the projectile directly through the water from one side to the other, or first “parting” the Red Sea and then firing the same bullet through a path that contains no water (FIG. 1).
In the first case of firing the bullet directly into the high-density water, even a massive, streamlined, 1000 m/s bullet will penetrate less than 1 m of the water. In the second case, after first “parting” the water (i.e. creating a path, from which the water has been removed), the same bullet even at 300 m/s can easily propagate for very long distances (this heuristic example does not address the drop from gravity, which is addressed later in the paper). It is this concept and geometry that we exploit, in order to achieve revolutionary control over high-speed flow and high-speed vehicles/projectiles.